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Monday, December 30, 2013

December 2013 Reports

Year Ending: The weather has been better during 2013 (after the rainy start) compared with the previous year, and the metering figures have become more steady, with the triennial figures (see below) finishing with where I wanted it to be, the PV being higher than the GSHP.
Peveril Solar Figures for the 29th Dec

Elsewhere... Russia released the Pussy Riot girls and the Greenpeace activists - a pre-Winter Olympics peace gesture, one assumes (and there were a number of bomb blasts in Volgograd Russia, giving Putin much more things to worry about.) Michael Schumacher is in hospital after an incredibly unlucky skiing accident, hitting a rock in what seemed like a smooth slowy slope. Britain was lashed by rain and windstorms, with many people flooded and more than 100,000 houses without power over Xmas. England were again beaten in Cricket with the Australians (now the Test series score is 0-4). Britain opens its doors to unlimited numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians (making many Macedonians and Serbians eligible). A Russian ship and other icebreakers are caught in ice in the southern oceans. Southern Sudan is still in a civil war that flared up in a week, and seems like the Ruandan one, with a number of massacres based on the tribes. A new island has formed volcanically off the coast of Japan, in the shape of the dog, Snoopy. Edward Snowden, the revealer of the information gathering of the US and UK governments, gave the Channel 4 Xmas address. Oh, and Mikhail Kalashnikov (inventor of the AK47) died, as did British comedian John Fortune. Closer to Nottingham, my own wife finished the year in hospital, being taken in on New Year's eve.

22 Dec 2013: It's the run up to Christmas and the university term has ended, but things still seem to be busy.

House annual 5,281, biennial 5,345 kWh.

GSHP annual 3,189, biennial 3,307 kWh, triennial 3,123 kWh.

PV annual 3,101, biennial 3,070 kWh, triennial 3,173 kWh. Steady....

Sunbox annual 3,479, biennial 2,961 kWh. Still going up!

Ground Temperature 10.4ºC - the lowest this winter, after an overcast cold week.

Scotland and England were lashed with strong winds of up to 100mph, but the worrying thing is that it coincided with a Spring Tide, so that some places on the east coast were flooded. The Thames Barrier recorded the highest ever tide level since its construction. Without the foresight to build this, the entirety of the Isle of Dogs, Canary Wharf and much else of east London would have been under the sea! See the potential flood diagram that has been widely circulated.

I won't print Peveril Solar update figures until next week. Ground Temperature was 11.0ºC, which is good.1 December 2013: Elsewhere in the world, there was the helicopter crash in Glasgow and a derailment in New York. Energy prices were still a big topic in the news, but why don't people just switch to the smaller companies like Good Energy, who have frozen their prices already? Cameron and about 200 UK business people travelled to China, the largest visiting trade delegation in Chinese history!

March 2015: Work on the solar dehydrator has been progressing well, and it is nearly complete, lacking merely the top surface of the sola...

Peveril Solar House

Welcome to Charging the Earth!

PEVERIL SOLAR is the first house in the UK to be entirely solar heated all year round! It is Carbon Net-Zero. It is an 'Active House' balancing inputs and outputs. PV generation and heating system consumption are in favourable balance using concepts of energy storage. Others claiming houses to be the first date from 2013 (and are unbuilt); this house exists and was carbon zero since 2011.

The name 'Charging' refers to 'storing energy underground': we have custom-built solar collectors, Surya Sunboxes, with ETFE front surfaces, to pump solar heat deep down into the earth. The building's heat pump gets all of this back in Realtime (immediately), Diurnially (later during the evenings) or Interseasonally (in Winter, months after the Summer).

Thus, we are augmenting the heatpump by storing long term heat in the summer, and we are defrosting the ground in winter-spring conditions, supplying solar energy directly to the heat pump, through its ground loop.

The five-way pentangle of Grid, Borehole, Heat pump, PV roof and Sunboxes have made the house Carbon Zero (for metered consumption). It's working, and we will continue to record data, to maintain that efficiency, and write it up in this website through to next year and beyond.

During theAutumn of 2012, we built a small house extension that is ultra insulated, with a higher energy gain than it loses.

Note, that we still have a net import of power from the Grid, because we still need power for lighting, cooking and appliances. But for the building emissions (as opposed to lifestyle emissions), we have achieved a credit balance of the regulated quantities, as recorded by meters.

The web-log follows the project from this general idea in Aug. 2009 to a technology of Surya Sunboxes, which seem to be effective - reducing energy costs of the house. Some of the Tabs will help you to get background and theory. You can click below to 'Follow Blog' to get email notifications - or email me. Please add Comments to the blog entries. If you find items in the Glossary that need explaining better, please ask. Thankyou!

Publications

Equipment sponsor

Kingspan, for Varisol Tubes

Equipment Sponsor

MG Renewables

Equipment sponsor

Ice Energy Heat Pumps

Equipment Sponsor

Holscot, for ETFE panels, re-fronting the Sunbox

About the Author...

David Nicholson-Cole is a Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Nottingham, with 35 years experience of architectural teaching and practice, which has included special interests in construction, building information modelling, tall building design and renewable energy technologies.

Finally, thanks to my deceased aunt, Margaret Cringle (1915-2008) whose legacy paid for most of the cost of this project - as one who was always turning lights out to save electricity, she would be very pleased!